Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to EMR and HIPAA for FREE!!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information.
We respect our readers' privacy.

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

For as long as I can remember, the growth of telemedicine depended largely on overcoming two obstacles: bandwidth and reimbursement. Now, both are on the verge of melting away.

One, the availability of broadband, has largely been addressed, though there are certainly areas of the US where broadband is harder to get than it should be. Having lived through a time when the very idea of widely available consumer broadband blew our minds, it’s amazing to say this, but we’ve largely solved the problem in the United States.

The other, the willingness of insurers to pay for telemedicine services, is still something of an issue and will be for a while. However, it won’t stay that way for too much longer in my opinion.

Yes, over the short term it still matters whether a telemedicine visit is going to be funded by a payer –after all, if a clinician is going to deliver services somebody has to pay for their time. But there are good reasons why this will not continue to be an issue.

For one thing, as the direct-to-consumer models have demonstrated, patients are increasingly willing to pay for telemedical care out-of-pocket. Customers of sites like HealthTap and Teladoc won’t pay top dollar for such services, but it seems apparent that they’re willing to engage with and stay interested in solving certain problems this way (such as, for example, getting a personal illness triaged and treated without having to skip work the next day).

Another way telemedicine services have changed, from what I can see, is that health systems and hospitals are beginning to integrate it with their other service lines as a routine part of delivering care. Virtual consults are no longer this “weird” thing they do on the side, but a standard approach to addressing common health problems, especially chronic illness.

Then, of course, there’s the most important factor taking control of telemedicine away from health plans: the need to use it to achieve population health management goals. While its use is still a little bit lopsided at present, as healthcare organizations aren’t sure how to optimize telehealth initiatives, eventually they’ll get the formula right, and that will include using it as a way of tying together a seamless value-based delivery network.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that without the reach, flexibility and low cost of telehealth delivery, building out population health management schemes might be almost impossible in the future. Having specialists available to address urgent matters and say, for example, rural areas will be critical on the one hand, while making specialists need for chronic care (such as endocrinologists) accessible to unwell urban patients with travel concerns.

Despite the growing adoption of telemedicine by providers, it may be 5 to 10 years or so before it has its fullest impact, a period during which health plans gradually accept that the growth of this technology isn’t up to them anymore. But the day will without a doubt arise soon enough that “telemedicine” is just known as medicine.

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

As someone who will soon will need to buy insurance through an ACA exchange – but doesn’t know whether that will still be possible – I’ve been thinking about my healthcare needs a lot, and how to meet them effectively if I’m ever uninsured.

Being an e-patient, the first thing that crossed my mind was to explore what Internet connectivity could do for me. And it occurred to me that if I had access to a wider range of comparatively-affordable telemedical services, I just might be able to access enough doctors and advanced practice clinicians to survive. (Of course, hospital and prescription drug costs won’t be tamed that easily, but that’s a subject for a different column.)

I admit that video visits aren’t an ideal solution for me and my husband, as we both have complex, chronic health conditions to address. But if I end up without insurance, I hold out hope that cheaper telemedicine options will get me through until we find a better solution.

Right now, unfortunately, telemedical services largely seem to be delivered on a hit-or-miss basis – with some specialties being easy to find and others almost inaccessible via digital connectivity – but if enough people like me are forced to rely on these channels perhaps this will change.

What’s available and what isn’t

This week, I did some unscientific research online to see what kind of care consumers can currently access online without too much fuss. What I found was a decidedly mixed bag. According to one telehealth research site, a long list of specialties offer e-visits, but some of them are much harder to access than others.

As you might have guessed, primary care – or more accurately, urgent care — is readily available. In fact one such provider, HealthTap, offers consumers unlimited access to its doctors for $99 a month. Such unfettered access could be a big help to patients without insurance.

And some specialties seem to be well-represented online. For example, if you want to get a dermatology consult, you can see a dermatologist online at DermatologistOnCall, which is partnered with megapharmacy Walgreens.

Telepsychiatry seems to be reasonably established, though it doesn’t seem to be backed yet by a major consumer branding effort. On the other hand, video visits with talk therapists seem to be fairly commonplace these days, including an option provided by HealthTap.

I had no trouble finding opportunities to connect with neurologists via the Web, either via email or live video. This included both multispecialty sites and at least one (Virtual Neurology) dedicated to offering teleneurology consults.

On the other hand, at least in searching Google, I didn’t find any well-developed options for tele-endocrinology consults (a bummer considering that hubby’s a Type 2 diabetic). It was the same for tele-pulmonology services.

In both of the former cases, I imagine that such consults wouldn’t work over time unless you had connected testing devices that, for example allow you to do a peak flow test, spirometry, blood or urine test at home. But while such devices are emerging, I’m not aware of any that are fully mature.

Time to standardize

All told, I’m not surprised that it’s hit or miss out there if you want to consult your specialists via an e-visit. There are already trends in place, which have evolved over the last few years, which favor some specialties and fail to address others.

Nonetheless, particularly given my perilous situation, I’m hoping that providers and trade groups will develop some standardized approaches to telemedicine. My feeling is that if a specialty-specific organization makes well-developed clinical, technical, operational and legal guidelines available, we’ll see a secondary explosion of new tele-specialties emerge.

In fact, even if I retain my health insurance benefits, I still hope that telemedical services become more prevalent. They’re generally more cost-efficient than traditional care and certainly more convenient. And I’m pretty confident that I’m not the only one champing at the bit here. Let’s roll ‘em out, people!

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source, software engineering, and health IT, but his editorial output has ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. His articles have appeared often on EMR & EHR and other blogs in the health IT space.
Andy also writes often for O'Reilly's Radar site (http://oreilly.com/) and other publications on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, and DebConf.

For the past five years, HealthTap has been building a network of doctors and patients who exchange information and advice through information forums, messaging, video teleconferencing, and other integrated services. According to CEO Ron Gutman, all that platform building has taught them a lot about what health app developers need–knowledge that they’ve expanded by listening to hospitals and third-party app developers over the years. On Tuesday, November 1, HealthTap announced a comprehensive cloud platform pulling together all these ideas. The features in the press release read like a wish list from health app developers:

Text, voice, and video messaging

Telemedicine

Population health

Predictive modeling

Device input and other patient-generated data

Handling clinical data from electronic health records

Aggregated data on patient groups, such as the frequency of concepts in the population

The ability to view timelines on patients

Searchable content from the huge library of clinical advice posted to HealthTap by its roster of more than 100,000 doctors

Identity management, so that patients and clinicians can verify who they are and connect securely

Customer relationship management through messaging

Many of the APIs covering these topics are covered in the developer documentation, and others are available by application from qualified developers.

Gutman told me that three to four years of work went into this platform, and that he hopes it can reduce the multi-year developments efforts his team had to deal with to just weeks for other developers hoping to innovate in the health care field. Transparency is promoted as a key value, because the developer terms required developers to “Clearly inform users what data you collect (with their consent) as well as and how you use the data you collect or that we (HealthTap) provides to you.” Even so, some items are restricted even more, such as adherence data and health goals.

In addition to RESTful APIs, the platform has SDKs for iOS, Android, and JavasScript. CTO Sastry Nanduri says that these SDKs permit apps to incorporate some workflows, such as making virtual appointments. His philosophy is that, “We do the work and make it easy for the developers.”

HealthTap has created its own formats and APIs instead of using existing standards such as the Open mHealth defined for medical devices (described in another article). A diversity of formats may make adoption harder. But the platform does harmonize diverse data from different sources into predictable formats, so that things such as blood glucose and body weight are shown in fixed units. Nanduri points out that most of their work has not been done by other organizations in an open, API format.

In any case, central to HealthTap’s goals and efforts is the sharing of data among organizations. If Partners Healthcare or Kaiser Permanente can open their data through HealthTap’s APIs, it can all be combined with the aggregated data from millions of records HealthTap has built up over time.

Offering this platform in HealthTap’s cloud gives it many advantages. Foremost is the enormous data repository of both patients and content served up by the platform. Second, identity management is automatically provided through the secure and robust platform HealthTap has always used for signing up patients and clinicians. Clinicians are carefully validated. Theoretically, a developer could also use an independent means of authenticating patients, so that someone can use apps built on the platform without a HealthTap account.

They are also exploring a blockchain solution for tracking permissions and contracts.

The proof of this huge undertaking will be in its adoption. I’m sure HealthTap’s partners and many other organizations will play with the platform and try to bring apps to life through it, either for internal use or for widespread distribution. Nanduri says that they are ramping up carefully, reviewing applications one by one, and will talk to each of their early developers to find out their goals and offer guidance to creating a successful app. Time will tell whether HealthTap has, as Gutman says, created the platform their developers wish they had when they started the company.

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Over the past year or two, the pressure has risen for providers to better document telehealth encounters, a pressure which has only mounted as the volume of such consults has grown. But until recently, telemedicine notes have been of little value, as they’ve met few of the key criteria that standard notes must meet.

The fact that such consults aren’t integrated with EMRs has made such an evolution even trickier. I guess doctors might be able to squeeze the patient’s video screen into one corner, allowing the clinician to work within the existing EMR display, but that would make both the consult and the note-taking rather inefficient, wouldn’t it? The bottom line is that if telemedicine is to take its place alongside of other modes of care, this state of affairs is unsustainable.

For one thing, health plans that reimburse for telehealth services won’t be satisfied with vague assurances that such care made a difference – they’ll want some basis for analyzing its impact, which can’t be done without at least some basic diagnostic and care-related information. Also, providers will need similar records, for reasons which include the need to integrate the information into the patient’s larger record and to track the progress of this approach.

All of which is to note that I was happy to stumble across an example of a telemedicine provider that’s making efforts to improve its consult notes. While the provider, Doctor on Demand, hasn’t exactly reinvented the telehealth record, it’s improving those records, and to my way of thinking that deserves a shout-out.

As some readers may know, Doctor on Demand is a consumer-facing telemedicine provider which offers video visits with primary care doctors, counselors and psychiatrists. Its competitors include HealthTap and American Well. Because the company works with my health plan, United Healthcare, I’ve used its services to deal with off-hours issues as they arise.

Just today I had a video visit with a Doctor on Demand doctor to address a mild asthma care issue, after which I reviewed the physician’s notes. When I did so, I was happy to see that those notes included a ICD-10 diagnosis code. The notes also incorporated a consumer-level summary of what the diagnosed condition was, what to do about it, what its prognosis was and how to follow up. Essentially, Doctor on Demand’s notes have evolved from a sentence of two of informal suggestions to a more-structured document not unlike a set of hospital discharge instructions.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly well aware that these are just baby steps. Doctor on Demand will have to move a lot further in this direction before consult documentation offers much to other providers. That being said, adding a formal diagnosis code gives the company a better means for analyzing key patterns of utilization internally by presenting condition, which can help its leaders look at whom they serve. Doctor on Demand can also use this information to pitch deals with potential partners, by sharing data on its population and underscoring its capabilities. In other words, these changes should make an impact.

Ultimately, telehealth documentation will have to meet the same expectations that other healthcare documentation does. And it’s not clear to me how freestanding telemedicine firms like Doctor on Demand will bridge that gap. After all, generating complete documentation takes far more than a few useful gestures. Even if the company threw a high-end EMR at the problem, merging it with the existing workflow is likely to be a huge undertaking. But still, making a bit of progress is worthwhile. I hope Doctor on Demand’s competitors are taking similar steps.

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Over the last couple of years, the number of telemedicine vendors out there fighting for business has exploded. These include DoctoronDemand, GoTelecare, HealthTap, MDLIVE, American Well and many, many more.

Health plans are jumping on the bandwagon too. For example, United Healthcare has been running a popular national television campaign advertising its “virtual clinic” services. UHC is my plan, so I can attest that this service — shown as embedded in its member site — hasn’t been rolled out yet, but that only makes its desire to get out in front of the trend more noteworthy.

Telemedicine models in play include companies that recruit providers and sell them to consumers, vendors who enable telemedicine via proprietary platforms and firms that lead with community building. At present the direct-to-consumer players seem to be somewhat ahead, simply because they’ve already begun developing a national brand, but the story doesn’t end there.

Though consumer-facing telemedicine companies probably have a viable business model, they’ll have to build a memorable consumer brand to make it, something that takes a great deal of time and money. On the other hand, vendors that offer white-label telemedicine technology to hospitals and health plans have at least as much to gain, without having to win the loyalty of fickle consumers.

One telemedicine player doing just that is Nashville-based PointNurse, which has developed a distributed collaboration and communications platform providers can use to deliver telemedicine services. I just spoke to CEO Cyrus Maaghul, who gave me a company overview, and was interested to hear that his venture is taking things in some new directions.

PointNurse is different than most companies in the telemedicine space for a few reasons.

For one thing, the platform includes block chain capabilities, which allow providers to accumulate credits for both community participation and actual care delivery. (In case you aren’t familiar with block chain technology, which powers crypto currency Bitcoin, you may want to click here.)

These credits aren’t just for fun. Eventually, when providers accumulate enough credits, they get a pro-rata share of a dedicated pool of equity.

Consumers, for their part, are given a multi-signature wallet which stores both their personal and clinical information, resulting more or less in a PHR with added capabilities. PointNurse hasn’t yet devised a way to share the data with provider EMRs, but that’s a short-term goal.

A wide range of providers can participate in PointNurse, including not only MDs but also nurse practitioners, pharmacists, RNs, LPNs and elder advocates.

A sister venture, HealthCombix, will license the technology underlying PointNurse to hospitals and payers. HealthCombix will provide APIs and tools to build their own distributed applications.

As Maaghul sees it, it’s critical for providers to realize more than a short-term benefit from participating in telemedicine. “I wanted to make providers feel highly motivated — that they can gain from this [arrangement],” Maaghul said. “This creates value for the patient.”

Of course, there’s no proof yet that this or any particular telemedicine business model is going to capture its market niche. In fact, it’s not even clear what niches will emerge in this space; after all, though it’s moving fast it’s far from mature.

That being said, this approach has some intriguing aspects. I’ll be interested to see whether its business model and and unusual underlying technology work out.

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Telemedical treatment has been a tantalizing possibility for many years, for reasons including a failure of health plans to pay for it and too little bandwidth to support it, but those reasons are quickly being trumped by the need for quick, cheap, convenient care.

In fact, according to research by Deloitte, 75 million of 600 million appointments with general practitioners will be via telemedicine channels this year alone.

While one might assume that this influx is coming from traditional primary care practices which are finding their way online, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Instead,a growing number of entrepreneurial startups are delivering primary care via smart phone and tablet, including Doctor on Demand and HealthTap, which offers videoconferences with PCPs, and options like Healthcare Magic and JustAnswer, which offer consumers the opportunity to get written responses to their healthcare queries from doctors.

Primary care doctors going into direct primary care are also joining the primary care telemedicine revolution; a key part of their business is based on making themselves available for consultation through all channels, including Skype/Facetime/Google Hangout meetings.

To date, most of the thinking about telemedicine have been that it’s an add-on service which is far to one side of the standard provision of primary care. However,with so many consumers paying out of pocket for primary care — and virtual visits typically priced far more cheaply than on-site visits — we may see a new paradigm emerge in which victims of high-deductible plans and the uninsured rely completely on telemedical PCPs.

Rather than being merely a new technical development, I believe that the delivery of primary care via telemedical channels is a new form of ongoing primary care delivery.

It will take some work on the part of the telemedicine companies to sustain long-term relationships with patients, notably the use of an EMR to track ongoing care. And telemedicine PCPs will need to develop new approaches to working with other providers smoothly, as coordination of care will remain important. Health IT companies would be wise to consider robust, unified platforms that allow all of this to happen smoothly.

Regardless, the bottom line is that primary care telemedicine isn’t an intriguing sideline, it’s the birth of a new way to think about financing and delivery of care. Let’s see if traditional providers jump in, or if they let the agile new virtual PCP companies take over.

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

It may come as a surprise to some, but according to a study by eClinicalWorks, the majority of physicians like EMR-connected apps, and mHealth apps in general. 2,291 healthcare professionals were surveyed, and 649 were physicians. Over 90 percent of physicians feel it’s valuable to have their EMR connected to an app. The study also revealed other interesting things concerning physicians and medical apps.

And EHR vendors may want to consider this when developing and updating their EHR. From the Black Book Rankings, here is a list of top EHR vendors among hospitals. I bet some of these ones definitely have.

On a similar topic, there was a recent study about physican EMR use in the United States. Apparently, they are behind other countries. While usage has definitely increased recently, with 69 percent of doctors using some type of EMR in 2012, it’s still well-below the rates in the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, the U.K, Australia, and Sweden, all that have EMR usage rates above 88 percent.

For anyone that is interested, there is quite a bit of legislation on telemedicine this year across the United States. This chart shows all that’s going on in three different categories — legislated mandate for private coverage, legislated medicaid coverage (primarily interactive video,) and other proposed bills affecting medicaid coverage.

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

While I don’t normally advocate turning to the Internet with health questions, Health Tap might be the exception. It’s like the Yahoo Answers of healthcare, except it’s actual doctors responding to the questions, rather than just any random person with an Internet connection. There are over 32,000 doctors across the United States that are participating, and making it easier for people to get health information at home.

Health Tap has just introduced a new feature to help further its goal to have a positive impact on the health of people. TipTaps, the new program, are little tidbits of health knowledge that incorporate pictures, and are created by some of the best doctors in the world.

The health tips are about 100 characters. They focus on more than 50 topics, and written by doctors who specialized in them. Unlike some programs that only send the messages through text, TipTaps can be delivered to any mobile device, or even just to email, and can be easily shared with social networks.

The messages can be received as often as a person wants, and are personalized for a person’s lifestyle, and what time of day they come at. Some example TipTaps are:

Managing Stress at Work: Too much stress? Breathe in for 4 counts, hold for 7, exhale for 8. Do 4 times. Anywhere. Anytime.

Lunch: Want to eat smaller portions? Try using a bowl instead of a plate.

As I mentioned, each TipTap has some kind of graphic that comes along with it.

It sounds like an interesting idea. I know that I’m not a huge fan of getting random notifications to my phone or email like this, but I’m sure that people that like to be encouraged throughout the day would like this. If you can select which categories you get sent, that would be cool.

To see more examples of TipTaps, view this PDF. If you’d like to sign up, you can subscribe here. It definitely looks like a high quality program — I wouldn’t expect anything less from HealthTap.

There are numerous apps out there to help you monitor your help but here is a brand new one that is also free. It currently only supports pregnancy and the first year of life but will be expanding into all fields in the near future. The full release can be seen here, but here are the major features that it will offer:

How HealthTap Works

Consumers on HealthTap can:

* Create a Home for Health with personalized health feeds, a dynamic customizable checklist, and secure storage of health information.
* Get succinct answers and tips from doctors, data from an extensive proprietary medical Knowledge-Base, and validated insight from community members similar to them.
* Find trusted doctors locally and nationally by exploring their insight, expertise and care.
Print a personalized Doctor Visit Prep-Sheet to make the visit smoother and more productive for both doctor and patient.

* Grow their practices and improve the quality of care that they provide patients, while reducing costs through HealthTap’s one-of-a-kind digital platform.
* Automatically amplify their knowledge and broaden their reach in social media.
* Create their own Online Medical Home where they can easily store and share their medical wisdom, extending relationships with patients beyond office hours.

“HealthTap is revolutionizing the way people and physicians find, share, and use health information, both on- and offline,” said Dr. Alan Greene, HealthTap medical director and clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. “HealthTap puts us all — physicians and users — on the same page, delivering an integrated health experience that gives patients succinct, actionable medical information from trusted doctors — anytime, anywhere. Simultaneously, it empowers physicians to effortlessly extend their wisdom and improve the quality of patient care beyond their office hours.”

To join HealthTap’s free public beta, visit www.healthtap.com.

About HealthTap
HealthTap, your Home for Health, is an Expert Health Companion that tailors information to each of its unique users based on their individual health characteristics. HealthTap’s free, interactive Expert Health Companion combines expert input from physicians, together with community insight, and data from its proprietary medical Knowledge-Base to help users make better decisions about their health and well-being. The HealthTap team includes highly experienced and accomplished members who have built health and mobile applications that have served hundreds of millions of people. Based in Palo Alto, HealthTap is backed by Mohr Davidow Ventures and prominent Silicon Valley angel investors, including Esther Dyson, Mark Leslie, and Aaron Patzer. For more information, visit www.healthtap.com.

Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to EMR and HIPAA for FREE!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information. We respect our readers' privacy.